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£ NORTH AND THE SOUTH! 



L E T*T E R 



FROM. 



J. C. LOVEJOY, ESQ., TO HIS BROTHER, 

n 

HON. OWEN LOVEJOY, M. C. 

WITH REMARKS BY THE EDITOR OF THE WASHINGTON UNION. 



From the Washington Union. 



We have not read, for many months, a piece of composition so 
pithy, so sententious, so able, so sound, catholic, or conservative 
in its sentiments and conclusions as this letter of Mr. Lovejoy. 
The production is the more remarkable, as the expression of the 
sentiments, not alone of the individual author of it, but of an 
immense class of honest men at the North who are sick to disgust 
of the abominable fallacies of anti-slavery fanaticism. It is the 
production of a " representative " mind, and the conclusions 
which it enforces are those, we doubt not, of an immense major- 
ity of honest, candid men in the northern States. 



Boston, March 16, 1859. 

Dear Brother, — I have read your speech of the 21st ultimo, 
delivered in the House of Representatives. It has points of 
considerable smartness, and will be praised by your partisans as a 
very clever effort ; but I see no other effect that it can produce but 
to irritate the South, and alienate one section of the Union still 
more from the other. Have we not at the North stimulated our 
own self-righteousness, in contrast with the sins of the South, 
quite up to, or beyond the healthy point? Would it not be well 
for us, for a time, to look more at our own failings and at the 
virtues of our brethren at the South ? 

You speak of the change of tone and sentiment that has taken 
place during the last twenty-five years on the subject of slavery. 
I plead guilty to the truth of this charge. It was one of the 
dreams of my early life, that the condition of mankind might be 
greatly improved by sudden political changes. The cry of the 
slave came to my youthful ear, wafted by the eloquent breath of 
eye-witnesses, from Virginia and New Jersey. Almost every 
man at the South, at that time admitted that slavery was an evil, 
moral, social, and political ; the horrors of the middle passage, 
the barbarian cruelties of Jamaica, came to us across th%oceai?i 
Wilberforce and Clarkson had acquired a world-wide fame by 
their singular devotion to the abolition of the slave trade : the 
assault was soon made upon slavery itself in the British West 



L*1 



Indies, and the first of August, 1838, was entered in the calender 
as one of the holy days of the year. 

Campbell painted the wild chieftain on his native plains, so 
noble, so free, so happy — caught, chained, doomed, suffering till 
the hurricanes in the West Indies were commissioned to avenge 
his wrongs. The plaintive Cowper wept out his compassion in 
the touching lines, " I would not have a slave for all the gold that 
sinews bought and sold have ever earned ;" aud these tones of 
suffering, of compassion, of pity, were echoed by every harp, and 
re-echoed by orator and preacher, till the whole atmosphere of 
New England was vocal with the cries of the slave. I have done 
my full share of it ; but greater men have been mistaken, and 
have in riper years been compelled to revise and revoke the opin- 
ions of earlier days. Burke once was enraptured with the voice 
of Liberty, as she cried from across the channel ; but in the full 
strength of his manhood, he was compelled to denounce the crimes 
committed in her name. Sir James Mcintosh wrote his " Vin- 
diciae Gallicse : but was compelled, by a longer experience and a 
wider observation, to cancel the opinions of early life by those of 
maturer years. I am compelled to cancel many things that I have 
said on the subject of slavery, and substitute for them the opin- 
ions of riper age. I might have once said what, or nearly what, 
you have said in your late speech in Congress ; though I think I 
should have left out thoes portions which serve no other end than 
simply to irritate, without convincing. But my convictions at 
the present time are, not only that the slaveholders have a com- 
plete vindication of their present position, but they are entitled to 
be looked upon as benefactors to the country and to the human 
race. 

The only ground on which I can claim their patience and for- 
bearance toward us meddling with their affairs, and for abusing 
them as much as we have, and as some still continue to do, is 
this : They gave us the false premises on which we reasoned 
correctly to false conclusions. They gave away their case by 
concession ; for if slavery be a sin, a wrong, or an evil, no fair 
mind can resist the conclusion that efforts ought to be made as 
soon as possible to do it away. This philosophy, that slavery is 
wrong, sprang up in Virginia, and was adopted and encouraged 
in nearly all the slave States ; and the seed was thence, in con- 
nection with the correct and grand principles of human govern- 
ment, scattered wide over the free States. They have had their 
growth, and now it is not a little difficult to pull them up ; but 
they shall take the wheat with them also. 

The South are impregnable. The constitution protects them, 
the Bible protects them, and the experience of mankind protects 
them. Our fathers made a covenant with their fathers. They 
t came into the Union with their African slaves on terms of equality 
• with u)s, and with all the rights and privileges that we can claim 
under the same instrument. They would make no covenant ex- 
cept upon terms of equality. We accepted those terms ; we 
coufd get no better to-day ; and yet we should be glad to make 



it, if it were not made, or to renew it, if broken, and on the same 
conditions we now have. The South claim the right to go into 
new territory, and try the new land with their slaves, till the 
territory becomes a sovereign State, and then bow to its will, as 
before all other sovereigns, This is a just and equitable claim, 
founded on a fair interpretation of the constitution. Slavery 
should be permitted to flow by natural laws to regions for which 
it is best adapted. It will go nowhere else. You could not force 
it into New Hampshire, nor keep it there if introduced. The 
experiment has been tried and failed. Slavery was given up in 
the northern States not by the force of moral, but natural laws. 

It is true the discussions of the last twenty-five years have pro- 
duced a great deal of sentiment on the subject of slavery in the 
northern States ; but you know how utterly barren of any good re- 
sults it has been to the African. In words — and because their 
number is small, and will continue to be small — we have in the 
extreme North given them the rights of citizenship and equality ; 
but in works we deny them. The most respectable colored men 
in Boston would not be permitted to hire or to own and quietly 
enjoy a pew in the broad aisle of any fashionable church. In the 
West, where your soil is more fertile, and where more free colored 
men would be likely to go, you are more stringent ; and the black 
laws of Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Oregon, and the still more ex- 
pulsive Topeka constitution of Kansas — for which, I believe, you 
and all your republican associates voted — proclaim, as with trum- 
pet-tongue, the innate and ineradicable prejudice against the Af- 
rican, lurking, as it still does, in the bosom of those whose 
tongues are eloquent for his rights. 

I am not a little surprised at the manner in which you speak of 
Noah. The Bible calls him a "just man, and perfect in his gen- 
eration ; and yet because he, by Divine inspiration and by Divine 
command, foretold the slavery of the children of Ham, you give 
him some very hard thursts, and leave him on the pages of your 
speech with a character by no means so fair as that given him by 
the sacred historian. Was Noah in the way of your theory, that 
you strike at him so vigorously, as though you would hew him 
down ? You say he mistook Canaan for Ham. Suppose he did, 
the prediction and the curse rest somewhere — on some nation. The 
principle is the same in the Divine administration. Who are the 
children of Canaan ? Tradition and history unite in the belief 
that they inhabit the continent of Africa. Their condition fulfils, 
with remarkable fidelity, the prophecy of that " righteous man 
and preacher of righteousness," Noah. " A servant of servants " 
was the double curse, which has rested on that continent and race 
for many centuries. It is covered with a net-work of double sla- 
very — every chief having his retinue of slaves, while he pays tri- 
bute to some higher chief or petty king. 

You seem to lay great stress upon the fact that the Canaanites 
were not black. How do you know ? Dr. Thompson, who has 
written, perhaps, the most thorough work on Syria and Palestine 



that has ever been published, says the ancient inhabitants of 
that country came from Africa The great painting of Samson 
grinding in the mill shows his Philistine drivers very dark, if not 
black. But you miss the point of the Scriptural precedent and 
example for slavery. You prove, as you think, that the Canaan- 
ites were not black, and then jump at once to the conclusion 
that, if they were not black, they must have been enslaved be- 
cause they were laboring men. This does very well to stir up 
prejudice at the North ; but is it the truth ? The Israelites were 
permitted to enslave the Canaanites not because they were labor- 
ing men, but because they were heathen, and thereby so degrad- 
ed that a transfer to the Hebrew Commonwealth, where the true 
God was worshipped, was a privilege and a blessing. 

This furnishes the parallel point on which American slavehold- 
ers rely with great confidence. The Africans Avere taken from 
the most degraded heathenism, and are here taught to worship 
the true God ; and, in the opinion of every Bible man, more of 
them have been fitted for and gone to heaven from the thousands 
in America than from the millions in Africa. Dr. Dwight said, 
after long experience and wide observation, that he never knew 
but one lazy man converted. And as God had some chosen peo- 
ple in Africa, it was necessary that they should be taught to work 
in order to their conversion. But in the South they are not al- 
lowed to read the Bible. Well, in Africa, they neither read it, 
hear of it, nor from it. Faith cometh by hearing : and is it not 
better to hear the truth than to live entirely destitute of it ? 

You quote the eighth commandment as a prohibition of slavery. 
This is singular. Were your ancestors thieves ? They brought 
or assented to the bringing of slaves to this country. It is a sin- 
gular fact, that while we boast of our Puritan ancestry, the laws 
of the present day Mould hang half the men that lived a hundred 
years ago, as engaged in the slave traffic, directly or indirectly ; 
and another law would imprison all the men who lived forty years 
since. The eighth commandment was given on the way out of 
Egypt. It was the charter, the constitution of the Hebrew nation. 
All their other laws were controlled by the Decalogue. Well, 
now what ? Why, they had slaves by Divine permission under 
this charier. How could they, if the eighth commandment for- 
bids it ? But are the slaves stolen ? Certainly not by Americans. 
They buy them, pay for them, transfer them, and provide for them 
in the only and most benevolent manner in which it can be done. 
As to the metaphysical abstraction, that man cannot have prop- 
erty in man, it has been contradicted from the foundation of the 
world to the present time. Holding, use, and transfer, are the 
elements of property ; and this has been done by men to men in 
all ages ; and yet you say that there is no word in the good old 
Hebrew tongue that conveys the idea of property in man. When 
a master inadvertently killed his slave, no blood was to be shed, 
for " lie was his money.'' Docs not that mean property ? 

It cannot be denied that the idea of slavery runs all through 
the Bible ; it was stamped upon the entire history of the Jewish 



nation, and upon the history of every vigorous nation upon the face 
of the earth ; indeed I strongly suspect this is the normal condition 
of large portions of a depraved race, and I can readily believe that 
a man may sustain the relation of slaveholder, in all good consci- 
ence, and with the entire Divine approbation. There are visible 
footprints of God's disapprobation of the abolitionism of this con- 
try. Look at the flocks of unclean beasts and birds that have 
come up out of its train. Infidels that curse God, abuse every man 
of good character, and then praise humanity in general to coun- 
terbalance their malignity and blasphemy. Out of the abstract 
rights of man have grown the more abstract rights of woman ; 
and once respectable wives call St. Paul a crusty old bachelor, 
and Abraham a tyrant, because Sarah obeyed him, and Paul 
makes mention of the fact. The second edition of the rights of 
woman is divorce, " affinity," and universal concubinage. We 
have far more of these immoral tendencies in the northern States 
than they have at the South. Is it not time to look at home? 

The truth is, we have been wont to comtemplate the condition 
of the slaves at the South from a wrong point of view. We com- 
pare them with races or nations more highly civilized, and their con- 
dition seems a harsh and degraded one ; but what were they when 
- the Christian nations took them by the hand and led them across 
the ocean ? American slavery has produced and cultivated more 
African intellect, more social affection, more Christian emotion in 
two hundred years than all Africa (Central and Southern) for two 
thousand years. American slavery is a redemption, a deliverance 
from African heathenism. " The dark places of the earth are 
full of the habitations of cruelty ; " and no part of the earth is 
more dark or more filled with cruelty than Africa. Treading be- 
neath their feet one of the most fertile soils, they cultivate almost 
nothing — live on fruits and nuts, with few cattle, and little com- 
merce. They are in the first place, lazy beyond all hope of self 
improvement. They will not work. Now, God has ordained the 
law of labor so surely, and so universally, that if barbarians will 
not work, civilization will yoke them up and drive them to it. This 
is fixed, sure as light and gravity. Why not? Why should one 
quarter of the globe, one section of the human family do nothing for 
the race ? If Ham will not bring timber for the ark, Shem and 
Japeth will drive him to it. 

But Africa is not only a great wilderness of loungers, but out 
of this idleness grow all manner of vices. Work is salvation. 
Work regenerates the earth and man. Work is progress, and 
without it nothing. The title deed of the earth to man had this 
proviso : that he should subdue it and multiply upon it. Now if 
he only multiplies and does not subdue, he has only a squatter 
sovereignty — no certified title till he builds his house and tills his 
farm. Hence the Indian must be driven out ; he will not work 
on any conditon, neither self-moved nor driven by the hand of 
another, and, therefore, the last tomahawk of the red man will 
soon hang as a trophy in the halls of the conqueror. Now, the 
African works patiently and wjll when driven to it ; he will work 



on no other condition. His climate is a terrible protection from 
white invasion, therefore he must be transported and taught to 
work, thereby civilized, thereby christianized, thereby improved 
every way, and perhaps by-and-by sent back to yoke up and sub- 
due his whole continent, according to the pattern that has been 
shown him in this working bee-hive of America. 

You touch in no very fraternal manner some of the social vices 
of your brethren at the South. Perhaps if they deserved the 
stone, it should hardly come from a northern hand ; the garments 
of our cities are dripping with the waters of Sodom, and some of 
the western States sunder the marriage covenant with as little 
consideration as the most ruthless slaveholder. Sensuality is not 
at this hour producing as much social degradation nor destroying 
as many lives at the South as at the North ; but this is not the 
point. What were the blacks socially when taken from Africa ? 
The King of Dahomey has four hundred wives, whom he employs 
in carrying palm oil to the coast, and thence new rum and tobac- 
co back to the palace for their husband and king. This rum and 
tobacco are the joint production of slavery and freedom. Slave- 
ry produces the tobacco and molasses, and then we Yankees make 
the rum and send them both in our vessels to the coast of Africa 
to buy oil gathered by women and carried on their heads in jars 
from fifty to two hundred miles. They are driven along by a 
herd of lazy men, and stepping carefully every minute under the 
express condition that if one pot of oil is spilled, one head of a 
woman and a wife must be cut off to atone for it. 

Now, is it any great sin to catch a set of these lazy fellows, that 
live on the earnings of their wives, learn them to work, make them 
work, teach them to love one another and to love their children, so 
that their highest ambition shall no longer be to buy an extra 
number of wives that they may have a few ''pickaninnies" 
(children) to sell ? A wild African recently brought to Boston by 
a merchant, begged for an old gun which he saw. When asked 
what he wanted of it, he replied, " to buy a wife and have pick- 
aninnies to sell." Is it any harm to yoke up such men and work 
the laziness and the brutality out of them ? Yes, but you say 
there is a better way to do it. There may be, but it wants the 
evidence of a successful experiment. The Moravians once 
kindled their altars of devotion all around the African coast, but 
the waves of barbarism have extiuguished them. Jamaica, in 
spite of devoted missionaries, British philanthrophy, and Ameri- 
can sympathy is fast receding through idleness to barbarism. 
Half a million of people there in twenty years have not lifted as 
many spades of earth as twenty thousand Yankees in California 
in one third of the time. If this half million had the twenty 
thousand to lead them and guide them and plan for them, then 
that island, which was once a fruitful field, would not be going 
back to a wilderness. The best thing that could be done for Af- 
rica, if they could live there, would be to send them a hundred 
thousand American Slaveholders, to work them up to some degree 
o£ civilization. ... 



It is charged that the life of the slave at the South is sometimes 
at the mercy of the master. In Africa the immediate body ser- 
vants of every chief, at his death, are at once beheaded and 
hurried forward to attend the new wants of their old master. Is 
it wicked to buy these devoted victims of heathenism and put 
them under the protection of civilized, and often of christian 
masters ? Just in proportion as the price of these slaves is raised 
in Africa, just to that degree is there a motive to the heirs to 
spare their lives. So far as Africa is concerned, the slave trade 
was and is humane in its operations ; its abolition was the result 
of sentiment, and not the determination of calm and deliberate 
statesmanship. That it was not called for by the condition of 
the world nor by any deep-seated moral sentiment, is proved from 
the fact, that the nation foremost in its abrogation has now 
revived it on other shores and under another name, adding to 
whatever sin there is in the direct open slave trade, the other sin 
of hypocrisy and false pretence. 

Jamaica wants laborers, not because there are not plenty of 
them on the island, but because they will not work ; and the 
same British philanthrophy which stands guard over the stalwart 
and immensely lazy son of Ham, brings in the feebler children of 
Shem, and dooms them to the same bondage under another name. 
Honor to the sagacious and far-seeing statesmen of Georgia and 
South Carolina, almost the only consistent slave States in the 
Union ; for they brested the united streams of British and Amer- 
ican fanaticism, claimed and maintained their rights, and saved the 
South from barrenness and desolation, the North from a civil Avar, 
and the negroes from barbarism. If more laborers are needed for 
Texas, Central America, parts Mexico and Cuba, they ought to be 
brought, without objections, under such humane regulations as 
are made in other cases for the comfort of passengers. These la- 
borers should come from Africa, because they are stronger and 
make better slaves than any of the copper-colored races, because 
they are more susceptible of transformation, and their improve- 
ment will be greater, and, lastly, because they are the most de- 
graded. 

As to the influence of slavery on the character of the whites, 
that is quite another question ; but so far as the political history 
of our country is concerned, it is not easy to see how we could do 
without the slaveholders. See how their names shine along and 
adorn the past history of our country : Washington, Jefferson, the 
Randolphs, Bayard, Pinckney, Madison, Monroe, Crawford, Rut- 
ledge, Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, Benton — blot out these names, 
and a countless host of others, from the slave States, and what a 
blank is left in our history. And do you not find men from these 
States now in Congress, fully the peers of any that you can name 
from the North in statesmanship, honor, integrity, patrotism, and 
high moral and religious character ? Do you not see some bright 
and shining lights around you from the South ? I have read no 
speeches that give more entire satisfaction, than those of the clear- 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



011 899 450 4 ! 

headed, broad-minded, candid, fair, patriotic Stephens, of Geor- 
gia, or his associate, Jackson. In their speeches they seem to me 
models for smaller statesmen to look up to, and strive to equal. 

A few words as to your motto at the head of your speech : 
"The fanaticism of the democratic party." If there could be 
found in the democratic party or in its history any of that ele- 
ment, certairly no one ought to be better qualified to deal with it 
than a gentleman from the republican ranks. They were born of 
it and nurtured by it ; it is their meat and drink, their nervine and 
anodyne ; their zeal in conflict and their consolation in defeat. 
The democratic party needs no defence ; a simple recital of its bi- 
ography is its highest eulogy. When the measure of British in- 
sult was full — when for twenty years they had insulted our flag, 
embarrassed and put under tribute our commerce ; when they had 
seized our sailors and fired into our ships, and hung innocent men 
for being found on board an American vessel, then Henry Clay, 
Felix Grundy, and John C. Calhoun, and their associates, perform- 
ed a lustration : — then the democracy of America vindicated the 
national honor, and established a new name and a new flag over 
the ocean ; and from that day to this all the progress and expansion 
at home and honor abroad have been won by the measures of 
the democratic party. 

This glory will remain, in spite of all that enmity or mistaken 
zeal can do to mar or destroy it. You may possibly succeed (but 
may heaven prevent you) in the attempt you are making to tram- 
ple under your feet the covenant of our fathers, and exalt a sec- 
tional party with sectional aims to places of power and trust ; but 
the day of your success would be the hour of your dissolution. 
Like the last day of the arctic summer, your sun would only rise to 
go down. Opposition is your cohesion — the only cement of your 
party. Your party can construct nothing ; they lay down no prin- 
ciples; adhere to no name. Mr Banks goes for the absorption of 
the colored races, while Mr. Blair goes for their expulsion. Which 
shall be the policy of the party ? 

The democratic party has carried the country up from small 
beginnings to its present prosperous and happy condition ; and, 
only occasionally being taken out to be aired and purified, is des- 
tined under that name, and with essentially its original and pres- 
ent principles, to govern this nation while we remain a republic. 
Equality among all the States — each State to manage their own 
affairs — slaveholders not to be taunted nor insulted for that fact — 
equal rights in the new Territories, and new lands annexed and 
new States welcomed, as fast as they wish to come. 

These are the principles, mottoes, and banners of success which 
wave around the democratic party. 

Affectionately, your brother, 

JOSEPH C. LOVEJOY. 

To Hon. Oaven Lovejoy, M. C. 



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